Are 9 out of 10 Catholics really leaving the Church, as many headlines say? Joe examines the study referenced in these articles and shows how it actually paints a much different picture…
Transcript:
JOE:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery and I want to come back from vacation by addressing what sounds on the surface like horribly bad news. There was a story from Catholic News Agency saying nine in 10 cradle Catholics are leaving the church or have left the church. And it didn’t take long for Protestant channels like Cleve to antiquity to seize upon this. Ben sat down with miles from answering Adventism, who now has his own channel called Canon and Creed, and they claimed these new statistics of Catholic apologists scrambling. And the problem is if those numbers sound unbelievably bad, it’s because they are literally unbelievable. They are not true. And we’re going to get into what the actual numbers are and how we know that and see how this is actually a very good piece by Olivan and Rhoda that has one false line that took the internet by a storm. So I want to address that, unpack what the data actually says, and then the positives we can take away from that because there’s actually some good news in there if you know where to look. So with no further ado, here’s the kind of misrepresentation of the data that Ben and Miles and a lot of people did where they took this to mean if you raise 10 kids, nine of them are statistically likely to leave the faith
CLIP:
Nine in 10 cradle Catholics leave the church. That’s a ton. That’s almost everyone. That’s 90% of people who grew up Roman Catholic are leaving the Roman Catholic Church. That’s absolutely insane. I just did a show with Javier Perdomo where we’re talking about this kind, sort about the big pull that they had for all the social media influencers to go to the Vatican. Like we got to come up with a strategy, we got to rectify this asap. So I mean, I can see why nine out of 10 cradle Catholics are leaving the church. That’s insane numbers, man.
JOE:
Look, I want to start by saying two things. Number one, he’s right. Those are insane numbers. Those are just literally unbelievable numbers. If we were losing 90% in each generation, the Catholic church would be gone within two generations or so. I mean it would just be infinitesimally small. And so while there has been a decline, it hasn’t been anything on that scale and we’re going to see that very clearly in the numbers. But the other thing to say is I want to sort of defend them. I think they should have done their research better than they clearly did, and there were even people telling them that they were reading the numbers wrong. But part of the reason they’re reading the numbers wrong is Catholic News Agency has a headline that says Study nine in 10 cradle Catholics leaving the church. And one of the reasons Catholic News Agency says that is because of this line from Rhoda and otherwise excellent journal article, which is called Religious Transmission, a Solution to the Church’s Biggest Problem.
So I’m going to let you hear their argument, see if you can figure out what went wrong with the numbers and then we’ll unpack what the numbers actually say. So first they start off by saying that in 1973, 80% of all those raised Catholics still identified as Catholic when surveyed as adults in 2002, that figure was 74% by 2022 to drop to 62%. More and more of those raised Catholic are leaving. Now already you might say, well, 62% is not 10%, that’s not a 90% drop. That doesn’t seem to make any sense. Okay, that should be the first red flag, right? Okay, that doesn’t sound like the data is saying 90% of cradle Catholics are leaving, but then Rodan Boli VI think reasonably argue, well, it’s a pretty weak criterion to say, well, they continue to check the Catholic box on a survey. Now I want you to remember that because we can’t eat our cake and have it too.
That’s the order that phrase goes by the way. And so if it’s not enough to just claim Catholic, you have to actually do something. Then we’ll want to remember that when we’re saying, okay, what does it mean to say you were raised Catholic? Were you just checking the box? Then we’ll get into that. But they’re saying that’s too low of a bar to really be a Catholic in a meaningful sense, we need some measure of Catholic commitment. And so a more salient question would be something like, do you still go to mass every Sunday? And on that score in 1973, about 34% of those raised Catholic were still attending Mass weekly or more often. By 2002 it had fallen to 20%. By 2022, it had plummeted to 11%, and it’s on the basis of that 11% number. They say, we are losing nine out of 10 cradle Catholics.
Can you spot what went wrong with that analysis mathematically? Because there is a very basic mathematical error and we can just ask the question like this, okay? Is it really true in any sense of the term, however you want to define what it means to be in the church or to be Catholic? Is there any sense in which it is true that nine out of 10 cradle Catholics leave the church or have left the church or are leaving the church? And I think there’s a couple ways you could pose the question. The first would be to say, okay, well did nine out of 10 people raised Catholic stop calling themselves Catholic. And we already saw the answer to that is no. 62% of those who say they were raised Catholic continue to call themselves Catholic. Now, what it means to say they’re Catholic, what it means to say they were raised Catholic is left a bit undefined, but it’s certainly not a 90% drop anyway, you cut it.
But then the second, and I think they’re right to say maybe more meaningful question would be, well did nine out of 10 people who went to mass as kids stop going to mass. Now you might say yes, because only 11% of people calling themselves Catholic or saying they were raised Catholic rather say that they go to mass every Sunday. Well, here’s the problem with that. You can’t assume that a hundred percent of those people were going to mass in the first place because remember the numbers they gave you that even back in 1973, only 34% of people calling themselves Catholic went to Mass Weekly or more and only 20% of those in 2002. So to say that you were raised Catholic, you might have been in that 20% or that 34% or you might’ve not, might’ve been in the 80% who called themselves Catholic but didn’t regularly go to Mass.
In other words, just as you now as an adult might say Catholic, even though you don’t really do much of anything Catholic wise to say you were raised Catholic, you might have been doing the exact same things then that you were doing. Now, here’s the problem. The data they’re wanting, what percentage of people who were raised practicing Catholics going to Mass every Sunday continue to do that as adults? That’s just not something that this survey is asking. This is what’s called the GSS, the General Statistical Survey. And the question in here is just in what religion were you raised? People can say Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Islam, Sufi, Sunni, Shia, some other religion, no religion don’t know or they could refuse to answer. That’s it. There’s no part of that question that they have to meet any criteria to say, well, you had to have gone to mass regularly as a kid if you were baptized as a child and never entered church again, you might say you were raised Catholic or you might not.
And you’re going in one of those two boxes based only on what you say in response to that question. That’s it. So when we’re looking at that weekly mass attendance, it’s true only 11% of people who call themselves raised Catholic go to Mass weekly. Well, actually that number might be a little too low and we’ll get into that in a little bit. It might be slightly higher than that, like 14, 15%, but okay, so you’ve got 11% we’ll say, but you’re not going from a hundred to 11%, you’re going from a much lower number like 20 or 34 to 11%. And in fact, we have good reason to believe that you’re going much lower than that because as we’re going to see the people most likely to not go to mass as adults, were the ones who didn’t go to mass as kids. That’s kind of a no-brainer, but it means that there’s just not anything like a 90% decline. There is a decline of some kind and we’re seeing something of that in the data, but it’s nowhere near a 90% decline. Now, this was something that again, I can understand Ben and Miles simply misunderstanding. They’re reading a headline and not really digging into the data at all, but this is something people have tried to point out to them and you can see them kind of reacting in real time to Pope Defender on Twitter explaining, yeah, this study doesn’t actually say what the headline says, says something very different than that.
CLIP:
Why is the headline fake? Because it completely misrepresents what the actual studies show. The headline implies either nine out of 10 kids identifying as Catholic or no longer Catholics or nine out of 10 kids raised attending mass or no longer attend mass. Neither of these are what the study shows. Instead, the study shows a decline but not an apocalyptic decline and people raise Catholic still identifying as Catholic with a recent uptick to somewhere around 62%. So if you raise your kids identifying as Catholic, six out of 10 of them still will. So let’s look at attendance. So he is kind of like he’s bypassing. The actual issue here is that nine out of 10 cradle Catholics are leaving
JOE:
And
CLIP:
Deflecting it well, and Cradle Catholic doesn’t mean that they’re still kids, right?
JOE:
They’re just misunderstanding what the objection here is. The objection is not that we think cradle Catholics are still in the cradle or that they’re still kids. The objection is it sounds like you’re saying nine out of 10 leave the church as in they were practicing and then stopped practicing. And that’s simply untrue. That is simply not what the data actually says at all. We can see this really clearly. Let’s say you’ve got somebody who grows up nominally Catholic. They come from maybe a Catholic ethnic background, historically Catholic people, and so their family calls themselves Catholic, but they haven’t practiced a faith devoutly in generations. They don’t believe what the church believes. They’ve got wildly different politics. They maybe baptized their kids. They might have at least tried for a church wedding if it wasn’t too inconvenient, but they have never gone to mass regularly. And that family, those kids, they grow up, they become adults, they can continue the exact same thing that they did their whole life.
Just take them as a case study. Did we lose them? Well, they’re doing the exact same thing they were doing before. What does it mean to say we lost them? If you say, well, they’re not really Catholic unless they’re going to mass every week, well then they were never really Catholic. If you say a more ambiguous relationship, a more lukewarm Catholicism still counts as Catholicism. Well, they still have that. They grew up lukewarm Catholics. They’re still lukewarm Catholics. And so you either count that or don’t, but it makes no sense to count it when they’re kids and then not count it when they’re adults and count that as us losing someone who stayed in the exact same spot they were religiously the entire time. That’s just not in any meaningful sense losing that person Now only in maybe a sense of a metaphorical, oh, we lost them, we failed to reach them in the first place.
But by that standard you could say we’ve lost most of the world who’s not Catholic. So it’s just not true that we’re losing nine out of 10. So hopefully you can understand why mathematically that’s simply not true. But we can get even deeper in the data, and I’m going to turn back to this GSS data in a minute, but there’s some data from the same time period that Pew Research Center did with its religious landscape study in 2023 and 2024, and it found the good news. I’ve mentioned this in an earlier episode and I’ll link to that at the very end, but it found the good news that the decline of Christianity seems to have floated or even leveled off, that you have this period of marked decline of Christianity really from the mid 20th century. You have of course the sexual revolution. You have a lot of people becoming disenchanted with traditional religion.
You have another kind of real steep decline both in the Catholic church after the sex abuse scandals in the early two thousands, but also just with the rise of new atheism and everything else in the early two thousands and sort of a reaction, we’ll get into this to the Iraq war and a view that religion is scary and dangerous. So you see all of this stuff in the data and that doesn’t seem to be happening still. That doesn’t mean we’ve immediately recovered all the ground. There’s still a lot of lost ground, and you’ll see it if you look generation by generation, but the hemorrhaging seems to have slowed or even stopped, and that is really good news. And one of the things that they found in that study is that 74% of people who were raised in a religion and grew up attending weekly religious services in a family in which religion was very important, still identify with their childhood religion today.
Now that’s not just looking at Catholicism, that’s looking at all religions, but this is the kind of data that Bolvan and Rhoda are wanting. Like, okay, if you raise your family going to church regularly and you make this the center of your life, how likely is it that your children, these cradle Catholics are going to grow up to continue to identify as faithful Catholics or continue to identify as Catholics at all? And the number seems to be somewhere around 70 to 75% and we’ll see more stuff that kind of points in that direction. So the 62%, that’s the low end of that, but that’s again, remember that’s 62% is not people who religion was very important and attended weekly religious services. That’s a much broader category of just I was raised Catholic. Maybe it was important to my family, maybe it wasn’t. And so if it was important, if you were going to mass all the time, at least every week, then the number’s much better than 62%, 74%.
On the flip side, if it wasn’t important to you, fewer than half of the children brought up in that context, they were raised in a religion, but groups seldom are never attending religious services and the family in which religion was not too important or not at all important. Then fewer than half of those kids continue to identify with their childhood religion, they’re much more likely at 40% to now say that they have no religion or they have a different religion, 56%, it gives you 16%. So cumulatively 56% of those kids are leaving the kind of lukewarm religious households. Again, that’s not specific to Catholicism, but it does immediately flag that this alleged 90% decline isn’t a 90% decline, and in fact, it’s not even as if you have a decline. So okay, go back to the weekly mass attendance numbers. You got 34% and then 20 and 11%.
That can sound like, okay, well we’re losing two thirds of weekly mass goers, and even that’s not what the numbers are actually saying. The numbers are much better among mass goers and people who take the faith seriously. So what do the numbers actually say? So here I want to turn now to the GSS data. This is the 2022 general social survey. I may have called it the wrong thing earlier, the general social survey, the GSS and I had to dig into the data to try to find this to double check what it was saying, and I wanted to see how the Catholic numbers compared to Protestant numbers, because I had this suspicion that raised Protestant or raised Catholic was too broad of a category to be particularly meaningful. That is going to include both people who were raised in devout homes and people who were raised in really lukewarm homes.
And sure enough, if I’m doing this data right, that’s exactly what we found. So I’m actually putting up the very boring slide showing the tabulation summary for a multilevel tabulation in the GSS data explorer because I am not a sociologist, so I’m using, this is all open source data and they have a tutorial about how to find out answers to things from the data. But because I’m new at it, I just want to make sure I’m not screwing things up because my numbers were slightly different, only slightly but slightly different than the numbers Rodda and Olivan have. And frankly, those guys deal with this kind of stuff a lot, but if the numbers that I’ve got are right or nearly so the Protestant and Catholic numbers are actually much more similar than one might expect, which makes sense if we realize there’s not a 90% decline.
The other thing to note here is I looked at only people who answered the question about still attending. There were plenty of people who skipped the question or didn’t answer, and maybe that indicates that they don’t attend or maybe they just missed the question or I don’t want to read into a non-answer. So I’m excluding the non-answers, which might bump up the percentage slightly, but I think it’s how to best handle excluded data. If somebody doesn’t answer a question, you don’t want to guess what their answer is. So with all of those very boring caveats, what do we find in the data among people raised either Protestant or Catholic, again, which is a very broad category that could be lukewarm, could be devout 30% of Protestants and 31% of Catholics no longer attend religious services at all, or maybe I shouldn’t even say no longer, maybe they never did, but 30% are completely not attending church.
31% of Catholics, that’s almost identical. On the flip side, about 22% of Protestants and 14% of Catholics attend either weekly or more often than weekly. So here I’ve found what seems to be a difference between the Rodan Boulevard data, but this again might be me just missing something in the data that it is true. 11% of Catholics, 11% of those raised Catholic say they go to mass every week, but another 3% say they go several times a week. That’s obviously we should include that in the number if that’s all right. So that should be 14%, but either way, you’ll notice that this is not 90% of people leaving in the same way. You wouldn’t look at the Protestant data and say 78% of Protestants leave Protestantism. It’s just not true. In either case of number of people who call themselves raised Protestant or raised Catholic, don’t attend church about 30%.
Another huge chunk depending on which group we’re talking about 45 to what is that? 55% attend church sometimes and then anywhere from 14 to 22% attend church weekly or more often. So again, not a 90% decline. And again, remember that’s from people who just say they were raised that way. That doesn’t mean a hundred percent of them were doing it devoutly and now only 14% of them are or 22% of them are. This is every, if you grew up in a not very devout family and you continue to be not very devout, you haven’t lost the faith, you’re maintaining the same level you had. Hopefully that’s really clear, but people have been getting this wrong online very consistently. Just going off of that one line in the Bevan and Rhoda data that the essay I should say about we’re losing 90% or we’re losing nine out of 10 cradle Catholics, we are not if by losing you mean they had a devout faith and then lost it, or they had regular practice of the faith and then lost it.
That’s simply not true. That’s simply not in the data at all. Well, we actually have, and Olivan I know knows this because he’s actually one of the best articulators of this is a multi-generational problem. And so there is a real problem here. It does deserve to be addressed, but it’s nothing like we’re losing 90% generation over generation. It isn’t as if whatever generation raised you, 90% of those raised in the faith left. That’s simply not true. You might know a lot of people who grew up devout and then left. That may be your anecdotal experience. It’s nowhere like 90% when you actually look at the data. What we actually have is, as I say, and as Olivan says very well to Eric Simmons, a multi-generational problem where what we’re seeing is not even so much people leaving the faith as people changing which box they checked because maybe their parents or grandparents disaffiliated or left the faith in practical terms many, many years ago.
CLIP:
Would it be fair to categorize it like this from the mid 1960s or so, maybe even a little bit earlier until the mid 1990s, late 1990s, what we see is a weakening where people are still identifying as I am Catholic, I am a Methodist, or whatever the case may be, but there’s a weakening in actual practice and maybe even belief.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then from the late nineties till today, both them and their kids are starting to say, I don’t really even need to say I’m part of this religion anymore because I really don’t believe it. Is that kind of a fair, very general, very broad way to describe it.
I think that’s basically it. And also you’ve got this generational thing. So for those people, and those people are the ones who aren’t getting their kids baptized after 2000. Now what they don’t have but their parents had was religiously practicing parents kind of breathing down their neck. Of course you’re getting them baptized. That’s now what, two generations if not three generations back. So they might’ve been baptized because of the grandma would’ve, it would’ve been a thing, but for their parents, who cares? I mean, you do you kind of thing. So absolutely, it’s that kind of, I say it is the fruits of two, three generations of this kind of hollowing out, if you like, of American Christianity.
JOE:
And in Rhoda and Boulevard’s essay, they actually acknowledge this. They say the parents are less devout than the grandparents. So those parents have less faith to hand on, so to speak. But then the children of those parents will tend to be less religious still, so they will have less to hand on to the fourth generation. The pattern is self-reinforcing. So if you’re hearing that 90% number as devout parents are losing 90% of their kids, it’s simply not true. It would be something the four generational cycle looks something more like this. I mean this isn’t perfect, but just kind of sketch this out as an illustration. You’ve got grandparents who are very devout, they identify as Catholic, they practice the faith, and then maybe that’s your silent generation or whatever. And then they have kids, baby boomers who identify as Catholic, but they don’t really practice the faith.
Maybe they go sometimes, but they’re not weekly mass goers. They then have kids, millennials or whatever who they’re raised Catholic because they went to church sometimes maybe it meant a lot to grandma and grandpa that they go to Catholic school or that they get baptized or that they have a first communion. So there was enough of a connection with the grandparents that they still consider themselves raised Catholic, but they were never deeply formed. They didn’t go to any kind of religious instruction. They didn’t go to mass regularly. Maybe they didn’t go to Catholic school at all, whatever, it’s, they have some connection enough where they would feel comfortable saying, raised Catholic on a survey. But if you ask them for deep theological knowledge of what does the church even believe or even shallow ... Read more on Catholic.com